In a perfect world, you would be selling a product anyone could use at any time, but such a thing doesn’t exist. Even supposed “essentials” have different audiences that they target. Do you think a single, health-conscious millennial looks for the same foods as a family of four that needs to eat on the go? Knowing this difference is the foundation for your marketing efforts.

Buyer Personas Explained

You probably already have an idea of the type of customer segments that you want to target with your marketing efforts. The next step is to create buyer personas. A buyer persona is to imagine a single character as representative for your market; an individual potential customer.

When creating a buyer persona, consider these marketing segments:

Background information (hobbies, education, professional interests)

Demographics(age, gender, location, earning capacity)

Information consumption (are they a segment that uses mainly social media, or TV?)

Common customer problems (What need do they want met?)

Things that keep them from making purchases (lack of funds, buyer’s guilt, competition, etc).

Let’s go back to that health-conscious millennial mentioned earlier. Rather than making assumptions, we can look to the data and try and get a more complete picture of what that customer would be.

Both the college student living off ramen noodles, and the young professional making headway in a new city, are examples of millennials. But what type of food are you selling? What is your price point? Your product will suit one but not the other. Figuring this out will help you narrow down your customer base, target only one, and give you a better chance of getting them to buy.

Targeting With SEO

When those millennials — your potential customers — conduct a web search, they type in certain words into a search engine. Your job is as a business owner is to figure out what that is. Using personas makes this easier as you can imagine and study the behavior of an individual rather than a crowd.

When you have those words figured out, look at your site and insert those keywords in appropriate areas on your website to get them to rank highly for certain searches. This can be done in meta tags, content, or website copy; ideally, all three.

This can be highly effective if you have the right persona in mind, but some companies don’t realise that they are targeting the wrong market, or a market that doesn’t exist. Even if they are currently succeeding, they may not know why, which will hamper their efforts at making well-informed decisions.

Others get an SEO audit to see what kind of customers they are bringing in, make sure that who they are reaching is who is going to become a customer, can be more responsive when trends change, and can better understand for what problem they really want your solution.

So book an SEO audit today and let our team of expert specialists in SEO, content marketing and UX design analyse your website’s reach to make sure you are connecting with that customer, and the ideal market segment for your business.